Persuasion: The European Court of Human Rights Is Betraying Its Purported Values

By Jacob Mchangama

Irakli Miladze, a food courier in Tbilisi, spent long shifts dodging not only the weather, but also fines for using bus lanes. They were the same bus lanes that government officials sped down in their fancy vehicles with impunity.

In late 2022, Miladze did what citizens in a modern democracy are supposed to be able to do: he took to social media and vented his frustrations. His central complaint was not merely that Tbilisi’s public transportation service is badly designed; it was that it is enforced with naked class bias. City hall employees, ministry officials, and State Security Service personnel were, he alleged in a TikTok video, “flying down the bus lane with tinted windows like they own the road,” while delivery drivers working twelve-hour shifts in the rain are fined for using the same lane to do their jobs. “You are acting like a bunch of motherfuckers who think you are better than everyone else,” Miladze said. “How exactly are you better than us? You are not better than us at all.”

The language throughout the video was, to put it mildly, unparliamentary. But despite warning viewers of offensive content, the video was shared 600 times and reached 100,000 viewers, evidently resonating among Georgians navigating the same chaotic traffic.

This did not amuse the impugned officials. Police were dispatched to Miladze’s house (he directed abusive language at the officers, which probably didn’t help his case) and Georgian courts ultimately fined him the equivalent of €180. Miladze took his case all the way to the European Court of Human Rights, hoping to benefit from its long-held view that freedom of expression protects ideas that “offend, shock or disturb.” Unfortunately for Miladze, the seven judges unanimously upheld the fine.

[. . .]

The implication is stark: online speech, precisely because it travels further and faster, warrants more restriction, not less. That gets the logic of democratic accountability exactly backwards. A food courier raging at the mayor of Tbilisi in 1995 would have been heard by twenty people. That his 2022 equivalent reached thousands is not an argument for punishing him more severely—it is an argument for why robust protection of such speech matters more than ever.

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